Learning to Be a Man

I’m the Greatest Erotic Short Story Author

Okay, so maybe I’m not the greatest erotic short story author, definitely not the most prolific, but maybe someone will buy one of my stories. It will probably just be my mom, you know, being supportive. It’ll be sooooo awkward when she reads about heaving bosoms and bulging bulges.

In my life, I’ve written one book. (You can find it on Amazon for $5.99. Helluva deal! Wink, wink.) Pretty much no one read it. I don’t blame them. It’s not the most amazing piece of fiction. It’s pretentious and uninformed. I started it when I was twenty-two. It was an assignment in a creative writing class. As a young writer, everything you write is precious. Actually, that never changes. Everything is still precious to me, but now I know when to keep things to myself and when to share them. I thought my short story would change the world if it just got in front of the right eyes.

As the semester moved on, I added more chapters. After I graduated, I added more chapters. Then I joined the Peace Corps. I was in living in a village in Benin, West Africa when I wrote the last few chapters. If you read the book, you can see me grow and mature. When I was twenty-two, I hadn’t really lived. I’d faced some hardships, but I was a white man living in America, I was born with privilege.

After a year in West Africa, I started to see the realities of the world. I didn’t understand them. I didn’t know how it felt to not be a white man from America, but I saw how it was for many segments of our society. And that came out in the last chapters. If I’d written more chapters after my second year or after I moved home and married, then the book might have ended differently.

The basic point is that I only published one novel, self-published, let’s just make that clear, it never got in front of the right people. So I published it myself. Still convinced that if the right people read it, it would fly off the virtual shelves of Amazon’s Kindle Store.

SPOILER ALERT — It didn’t.

Continuous failure humbles a person. Now I don’t look at a blank page and hope to write the great American novel or win an Oscar. I just hope to have fun and get paid for doing this thing that I love. I hope that when I fill this page, it will save me from office life. Which is not to say that’s a bad life, it’s just not a life I want to live.

Somehow a post about sex and erotica is turning very serious. Let’s just move on.

AN EROTIC SHORT STORY

Oh yeah. We’re talking about sex. We’re talking about smut. Get excited. Well not yet, but when you read it, get excited.

Actually, I don’t even know how excited people are by erotic stories. Perhaps they do and for that, I salute them. Our society has been hard on romance novels and erotic stories. Fifty Shades of Grey exploded on the scene. Everyone I know that read it, and turns out quite a few people read it, chastised it for E.L. James writing. But you know what? They all read it. They read the sequels. So they seemed to enjoy it. It tapped into some part of their being that needed tapping. (No pun intended.)

I love horror films with all their violence and gore. Quentin Tarantino is seen as a genius, yet his films are also considered violence porn.

As a kid I remember having to cover my eyes during sex scenes but I could keep them wide open during segments of violence. Why does our world glorify violence while only whispering about sex?

This debate or argument is nothing new. So I won’t bore you with it.

ALL THE SEX SCENES

Of all the things I’ve written, I’ve only written two sex scenes. One was tender and the other was disturbing. If I look at the violence in my work, nearly everything is violent. Perhaps it’s time to take a stab at something new. Something different. And honestly, something outside my comfort zone.

I’m just like you, I don’t think of erotic stories as high brow. I mocked Fifty Shades of Grey and guess what, I’m the biggest asshole of all of us because I never even read it.

I’ve written the first erotic short story in a series of erotic short stories. It’s an origin story of a strong female growing up in space. I’m not going to tell you the name or the title of it, because I want everyone to discover it on their own. Perhaps it will suck. And it will sit on its virtual shelf next to my other literary failure. But maybe, just maybe, the right eyes will find it and it will be a huge hit.

Wish me luck.

Have you ever read an erotic short story or romance novel? What did you think?

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I'm a writer in Los Angeles. I'm in my mid-thirties and I'm still trying to figure out what it means to be a man. Come here to watch me fuck it up.
You can read some of my writing at The Way I Remember It. If you're looking for a digital agency check out my company Something Creative. And last, but not least, if you're a dog owner and want some of the most amazing dog sh*t bags, check out my company Biz Bagz.